more on firmware loading need

Your questions are valid. I had similar question when I bought these cards. These cards in particular have no rom chip on the pci card. If you plug these into a computer they do nothing until you load them with there firmware. When vt6410 are used on motherboards not as stand alone cards the bios has this firmware and loads it into the chip set on boot making them show up and function using the linux driver for via ide controllers. In the case of add on cards the bios usually doesn't have this firmware included. In win land the driver includes this firmware and loads it on initialazion of hardware. On linux we do this same sort of thing with wifi cards but i found no reference to using this for an ide controller. I only found reference to updating mainboard bios to include this firmware to be loaded. The particular board I have doesn't have enough space left to make this happen. I'm hoping to use syslinux to chain load the firmware loading then boot linux. I'm no expert at all of the options or possibilities that syslinux has. I'm hoping that this is possible. Or someone has another solution. I don't like scrapping hardware even if it cost very little. As for using kernel 2.6.22...I wish. At this point I'm trying to use dban with minimal rework time at this point that doesn't seem to be happening. He has a beta version which meet most of my requirements but wraps his initrd/root inside his kernel using lzma to compress/uncompress the whole thing. His kernel(2.6.20.7) should see the card but without the firmware no functionality. I was hoping to keep this project simple. Now it seems I'm going to recompile the whole thing to get/add the functions/features I need. I might as well do a fork of dban just to get it were I think it should be. I tried this card in my main desktop system which runs debian lenny standard kernel (2.6.21whatever) and it shows the card in lspci but doesn't create /proc/ide/hd* for any of the channels. I had known good hardrives plugged into the card at the time.

I'm sorry that this post has moved away from only syslinux specific help but I hope this backround helps other in understanding what I hope to complete. If syslinux can load firmware that would solve most of my issues at this point. Again any ideas would be great considering the stress I've created for myself.

I fail to see why you would need a firmware for the vt6410 - at least not for basic IDE functionality.

Please try "modprobe via82cxxx" in Debian (etch or lenny for that matter) and see wether this changes anything (dmesg might be interesting as well).

Seeing a device via lspci only means that it can be seen on the PCI bus, and maybe that a device name is known for the vendor/device ID combination - nothing more, especially not about driver support.

That said, if the above doesn't help, you probably would have a chance with some c32 code to load a firmware into the card(s), but getting this done in a (custom) initrd in linux might be far easier (i.e. time-efficient).